Raphael John-Lall

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte yes­ter­day told of­fi­cials of the T&T Postal Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) the com­pa­ny has to keep evolv­ing to meet the de­mands of the con­tem­po­rary busi­ness world.

“If you do not change and you are not con­stant­ly rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing your­self, you will die. That is busi­ness,” he said.

In an ad­dress at the launch of TTPost’s re­tail cor­po­rate of­fice in Ch­agua­nas, the Min­ster that as an or­gan­i­sa­tion with 1,084 em­ploy­ees that de­liv­er mail week­ly to 250,000 house­holds through­out the coun­try at least twice a week, TTPost must do more to be­come to­tal­ly fi­nan­cial­ly in­de­pen­dent.

“We have to move or­ga­ni­za­tions like TTPost 100 per cent out of their de­pen­den­cy on the state. When we are able to do that, if the state does not have to sub­si­dize for TTPost, by ex­ten­sion the state is able to take that sub­sidy and ap­ply it to oth­er ar­eas like old age pen­sion, schools and books,” he said.

Le Hunte said the say­ing the cus­tomer is al­ways right is a pri­vate sec­tor law that ap­plies to al­most all busi­ness­es “be­cause at the end of the day it is your cus­tomer that keeps you in busi­ness.”

He ex­plained: “You are not op­er­at­ing a busi­ness for your­self, you are op­er­at­ing a busi­ness to sat­is­fy a need and as long as that need is there you need pro­vide that need. One of the dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tors is cus­tomer ser­vice.”

The min­is­ter said even for those pri­vate busi­ness­es that op­er­ate in a mo­nop­o­lis­tic seg­ment of the mar­ket, there is the need to main­tain ex­cel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice.

“As a mat­ter of fact, be­cause you are the on­ly provider of that ser­vice, the onus is up­on you to raise your game and en­sure what the cus­tomer wants he gets,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to LeHunte, while TTPost has un­der­gone many changes in the last 20 years, in­no­va­tion will keep the or­ga­ni­za­tion alive, so it is im­por­tant to seek out op­por­tu­ni­ties “to get in­volved in us­ing tech­nol­o­gy.”

He al­so not­ed that TTPost op­er­ates in an in­dus­try where the core busi­ness is de­clin­ing, so it is im­por­tant to re­main rel­e­vant.

“We do not live on an is­land on­to our­selves and what hap­pens in the world im­pacts on us. If you are op­er­at­ing in an in­dus­try that is chang­ing rapid­ly, if you de­cide to stay still, then you will end up be­ing a di­nosaur,” he said.